Missing Drumstick

January 17, 2012

Of course I’ll preface this with the usual “I’m not a superstitious or generally spiritual person” but…

In high school I was in the drumline, and we usually practiced early in the morning prior to school starting. We were inside the bandroom that day because it was fairly cold. So anyway, I’m doing my thing, playing the tenors (toms for the layman) and I drop one of my mallets. I turn to pick it up and I can’t find it… There is about ten feet of open bare floor surrounding me and nowhere to be found. My instructor stops us and basically just asks me what the problem is. So several of us start searching around, can’t find it. I say screw it and grab a spare set. About twenty mins later, the band director walks in, unlocks his office, sits at his desk and knocks on the window, I look up and he picks up the mallet off his desk with a look like, “what is this doing in here?” I could verify that it was mine because I marked each set. Nobody had gone in or out, no gap under the door, locked room, ended up on the desk. There were 15 of us in the room at that time and there was a unanimous “NOPE!!!!!!” moment. I was stunned and one of my buddies came unglued. We pretty much canceled the rest of rehearsal right there and many of us were pretty bugged about it the rest of the day. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for almost a week after that. Eventually my brain just filed it away under “unsolved mysteries” and I went on with life.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.